


Dirigible

by jenna_thorn



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Steampunk, Gen, Rule 63
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-05
Updated: 2016-01-05
Packaged: 2018-05-12 05:36:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,648
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5654386
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jenna_thorn/pseuds/jenna_thorn





	Dirigible

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Medie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Medie/gifts).



Natasha folded the broadsheet, careful of the ink and her own inexperience in cleaning her gloves. The trinkets the family retainers had pressed into her hands had carried her to Londonium, and sheer persistence had gotten her here to Stark’s over ornate offices next to the aero-port, but at this point, jumping at shadows and trading on a name she didn’t dare pronounce aloud, she was running out of both.

A briskly professional receptionist escorted her past the front entry into a smaller seating area, fit for any salon in town and complete with sherry and glasses on a tray on a low table by the settee. Natasha sat, her hands folded in her lap, and watched the door, a curtained pass through, possibly to a dumbwaiter, and the almost completely concealed door hidden in the dark paneling of one wall. Her sisters would have missed the telltale crack, but her sisters were dead, and she was not, and she sat with her head still and only her eyes moving, looking for false doors and discrete points of entry or exit.

The door that was obviously a door opened and a tall slim woman in fashionable dress and unfashionable hair entered. Natasha rose to meet her extended hand and she introduced herself as Pepper Potts. “Thank you again for meeting with us on such short notice, and I do appreciate your trip here. Due to the unusual nature of the journey, Miss Stark feels it best that everyone meet one another first, before we finalize any contracts.”

So nice to know this, Natasha thought, given she’d vacated the boarding house and her trunk was in storage at the port. Natasha inclined her head, deliberately mimicking her mother’s demure nod. “We shall be living close as sisters, I believe. Some familiarity shall be inevitable, especially so far from civilization.” 

“You say that as though I were civilized here,” announced another woman as she entered the room and leaving the door open behind her.

“I live ever in hope, Miss Stark,” Miss Potts answered and smiled at Natasha, inviting her to join in the joke. 

“The translator, right?” Antonia Stark, familiar from scandal, even to a stranger in this land, asked. Natasha nodded and Stark said in oddly accented Mandarin, “ _My steed is healthy and we meet you as equals_.

Natasha answered, “Your horses may be well, but I don’t own a horse, thank you.”

Stark replied in Cantonese, “Touch me and I’ll stab you.”

Natasha glanced at Potts, who was watching both of them with polite, if slightly befuddled, interest. “Ah, so this is going to be that kind of voyage.”

“I think I just verified who the better tutor is. Potts, fire Miss Shen. So, how many languages do you speak?” 

“Chinese, as was the advertised request, also French, English, Italian, Spanish, and German adequate for business communication, although I’ve been told I have a Polish accent.” She pressed her tongue against her teeth to keep from mentioning Russian. “I can read Greek and Latin, of course.”

“Who speaks Latin in this enlightened age?” Stark asked.

“Qui quidem,” Natasha answered.

“Right, I’m convinced. Let’s take a walk.” Stark swept through the open door, Potts trailed in his wake and Natasha sighed, gathered her gloves, and followed cautiously through the office area to a cavernous space.

The dirigible floated before her, ropes trailing like vines and a scurry of activity below, around, and even atop it. It bobbed gently, as though it were a held bird. Stark chattered on, pointing out the scientific equipment, but Natasha noted that below every observation port was a gunwale and hanging off the netting on the basket were the brass shine of both spyglasses and gunsights. 

The acrid scent of chemicals pulled her attention and she peered around a blocked off corner, to see a covert laboratory worthy of the penny dreadfuls tucked into a space bordered by cargo boxes. Glass beakers bubbled over open flame and she looked back to the airship in some alarm.

“Not hydrogen. The ship, I mean.” The woman leaning over the stack of open books piled one on another said. “I’m Stark’s chemist, Betty, I mean Elizabeth, sorry, we’re casual around here, Banner. Chemist. Me.”

Natasha nodded. “So it is safe?”

Banner’s smile was half hearted and more than a bit crooked, a twist of her lips in the shadowed corner, and the fire bubbling through liquid tinted part of her face slightly green. “Safe as gunpowder and travelling across the world and anything else Toni does.”

“Not safe at all, then.”

“Oh, you’ll fit in just fine.”

“Of course she will,” Natasha deftly sidestepped Stark’s overly familiar arm and Stark swept over to Banner with barely a pause. “Pepper says so, and we all know that … Pepper is always right.” Stark beamed at Natasha in victory when Banner mumbled in singsong along with her. “So,” Stark clapped her hands and rubbed them together. “You’ve met one of our sorority, now come and meet the others.”

Natasha nodded at Banner, who responded with a shrug and more of a smile than she had shown so far and followed Stark to where a tall woman with blonde hair and strong shoulders wearing crossed belts heavy with holsters over a leather skirt stood, her arms crossed, glaring at the workmen. 

Stark waved her to them with sharp movements. “Rogers, be nice.”

“I’m always nice, Stark. Hello, you must be our translator.”

“Yes, she is, but we are being civilized at Pepper’s request, so you are Sarah Rogers and she is Natalya Rachman and not Soldier and Translator, respectively. Though I suppose I could get used to being called …” She walked off, her voice lost in the hubbub.

Natasha nodded, and the other woman held her hands up in silent apology, dirt smudged into the creases of her palms, up to the wrists. “Soldier?”

“Stark’s idea of a joke.”

“And inaccurate besides. If your chemist is the mad scientist, then clearly you are a cowboy, of the westerns.”

Rogers grinned broadly and it transformed her features from stern to the point of forbidding to girlish. “So are we all tawdry popular fiction, then? The mad scientist, the cowboy, the rich debutante. We even have a gymnast from the circus. So that makes you …”

Natasha kept her smile gentle by force of long practice. “I am clearly the naïve girl, come to the city for adventures and to find my fortune.” 

“Not the lost heir?” Rogers asked and Natasha shifted her weight to her back foot, to be ready to move. Rogers continued, “It’s a theme, these days, though fading in popularity, I suppose.” She brought two fingers to her lips and whistled shrilly. An oddly shaped someone on top of the airship rose, then jumped off. Natasha could not hide her shocked gasp as the body plummeted toward the brick floor of the hanger, then seemed to fly sideways to whip one rope sharply to the left and slow her descent. 

“Remarkable, isn’t she?”

“Heartstopping.”

“That, too.” Rogers agreed. They watched as the figure strode toward them, pulling with quick tugs a wadded skirt out to fall over too short petticoats. By the time she reached where Natasha was standing, Stark had drifted back toward them. The newcomer stepped up, her heelless slippers making her the shortest of the group, her dress modest, but in some disarray. 

“And this is Barton. She sells her body.”

The woman in front of her stiffened and threw a dark look at Stark, who had turned and was staring at the airship. “Miss Stark has trouble understanding the concept of a sellsword. I’m not actually a prostitute.”

Natasha felt her heart grow cold. “You are a mercenary?”

Barton withdrew her outstretched hand. “You’d be more comfortable with a prostitute, wouldn’t you?”

Natasha stepped slightly to the side. If she could put Rogers between them, perhaps she could…“No, no, I simply don’t have much experience with –“. Rogers shifted and Natasha remembered her earlier comment. She slid her hand into the pocket with the open seam, the cool of the steel against her fingertips a reassurance.  
Rogers kept her hands high, away from the guns at her hips. Stark bounced on her toes, to all appearances amused. Barton put her hands on her hips and cocked her head. “I know who you are, I know who your mother is, and Stark’s paying me, not the Trotskyites.”

“And when they offer more than Stark?”

“So you do have experience with mercenaries, after all.” Barton smirked, then shook her head, the ends of her tousled hair falling around her shoulders. “I’m not going to slit your throat or sell you out, принцесса.”

“You’ll understand if I sleep with a blade under my pillow.”

“It’ll match mine.” Barton’s grin was wolfish.

Natasha felt her own polite grow sharp at the corners to match. So be it. “You all know, then?” 

“Guessed,” Rogers said, with an elbow to Stark’s side. 

“And you’ve lured me here for the bounty?”

“Why would we do that?” Stark looked genuinely confused. “What would I do with money? Well, more money. I do _this_ with money.” She spread her arms in an expansive gesture, taking in the airship, the workers, the whole of the hanger and coincidently, the four of them. 

Natasha kept her fingertips on the stiletto concealed in her skirts, touching it like a talisman. “You’ll find no benefit to blackmail.” 

Rogers flinched and Stark sobered. “I’ve no intent to do anything of the sort. You are to join our happy sisterhood, under whichever name you like, I like Natalya, trips off the tongue – Naahh taaah Lee –Yaah -- and we are going to leave here, on that, and make a world of men weep.” Her smile widened, turning a bit cruel at the edges. “Particularly the small minds at the Reform Club.”


End file.
